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Silent 500W Power Supply
NightRyder writes "To cope with the increased power demands of today's processors and video cards a 500W silent power supply has been released by Antec. The topic of silent power production has been an important one to the computer community recently, especially concerning the increased hardware demands by new game and operating systems. Considering the processing demands of something like, *cough* Windows Vista, its important to be able to keep your computer cool without it getting loud."
This powersupply looks nice but what is the news? The article even mentions that this is not antecs first silent power supply. There are also completely silent PSUs made by other companies with better efficiency than this.
With no fan, it should be pretty close to inaudaible from a couple of feet away.
I looked up the specs on one and it was 82% efficient at full power. That's 90 Watts of heat it needs to get rid of without a fan. Toasty!
It has a fan.
If that fan is moving, noise is generated.
Ergo it is not silent.
QED.
I've got 2 computers with 6 hard drives, a refrigerator and a small pepsi machine, my room sounds like a wind tunnel and that's just the way I like it!
I've really never been bothered by the noise, it's very loud in my room and I'm just used to it. If it was silent in here I'd never be able to fall asleep because I'm just used to hearing that noise in the background and that always helps me sleep. Kind of like a wave machine or something, it's peacefull. Lets me know we still have power. If I wanted to make a silent PC I could probably do it pretty easily, water cooled and kept in a box (like a wooden box or a cabinet or something like that) with sufficient ventilation.
Geeze, dude, even skipping over the fact that MS never said 256 MB would be required, do you even understand what Windows uses a video card for?
_How_ is that card going to stay in use while you run a full-screen 3D game? No, really, what UI animations do you think Windows runs in the background while a game has the full screen? Why would it need to keep that RAM allocated? No, seriously.
For that matter, what do you think it uses it for when you're outside a game? Well, 99% of the time for nothing whatsoever, and the other 1% of the time for some fancy UI animation. And that's if it's a REALLY fancy UI.
So a slower graphics card would do... what? Animate those occasional fancy effects at 10 frames per second instead of 60? (And then go back to sitting idle.) Even skipping over the fact that you can turn that fancy stuff off completely, how's that going to force you to get a top graphics card and a 500W PSU?
So, please.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hook up your UPS to a two 70AH car batteries and let it run unplugged at full-load for an hour, it will be hotter. I read many stories about UPSes overheating or even catching fire when run for too long beyond what their stock batteries would normally allow at full-load. UPSes meant for extended runs have fans... look at APC Back-UPS XS and RS series... the XS has no external battery connector and no fan while the equivalent RS has both the external battery connector and a fan.
Laptop bricks only provide 12-20VDC, the laptop itself has a number of extra converters in it to provide all the other voltages (Vcore, Vram, Vio, Vterm, 3.3V, 5V, etc.) from the battery and charge-controller circuitry. The laptops' external brick is there to decouple non-essential AC power circuitry from the mobile components, the laptop still requires local bulk power regulation. There is also the problem that an external PSU would have slower transient response times. With today's systems where the load can change by 10A in microseconds or less, an external PSU would probably need a secondary regulator (at least a large capacitor bank) inside the case. For a laptop, this is not an issue because everything goes through the battery controller. For ITX, this is not as much of an issue because they are mostly low-power systems.
Since technology is moving towards local voltage regulators for faster transient response, PCs should migrate towards single-rail power distribution (something like 24V with 20-35V tolerance for easy UPS) to avoid triple, quadruple, etc.-tuple conversions... converting directly from a single higher voltage source decreases the load on intermediate regulators, reducing conduction and switching losses across the board.
PSUs with efficiencies over 90% are possible but every 1% over 85% is more expensive than the last... synchronous rectification alone doubles the number of required high-speed, high-current MOSFETs and other parts.